On blogger, one of the options if “notify weblogs.com”. I had no idea what that site was when I set this up, so I chose not to notify them. More precisely, I chose to accept the default Google had given me, and not to notify them. Had the checkbox been clicked, I would have almost certainly decided that the action corresponding to my interest was to, in fact, notify the site.
I still don’t know what notifying weblogs.com would do for me, but I do know that I should make decisions for my users, and then if they really want to, they can change those options. It’s what makes great programs great.
For instance, my current setup of Firefox has some pretty amazing stuff in it. I have some regular expressions that test the url I’m looking at, at apply the Yale proxy server if necessary. My browser syncs at “work” and at home. I can take a snapshot of any page I’m looking at and have it saved. I can do about a million other things which I will one day catalogue. But when I first installed Firefox and had no intention of thinking of any of those wacky tools, it worked, perfectly. Despite infinite extendability, Firefox remains simple enough for anyone to use. And those options really do make the difference between a good and a bad program.
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